"Score one for Truett!" said Philip; "proceed, Mr. Engineer." "Thank you, and thanks to Caleb. The items of cost will be only road-bed, ties, and metal. A single track, with heavy rails, can be metalled out here for less than three thousand dollars per mile: that means nine thousand dollars for the three miles, and that should be the total cash outlay, for the road-bed and ties can be provided, by local enterprise, without money." "Pardon my thick head," said Philip, "but how?" "By organizing a stock company with shares so small that any farmer can subscribe, his subscription being payable in ties, which he can cut from his own woodland, or in labor with pick, shovel, horses, plough, scraper--whatever he and we can best use. Fix a valuation on ties, and on each class of labor, and pay in stock. 'Tis simply applying our drainage-ditch plan to a larger operation, though not very much larger, and one that will be attractive to a far greater number of men. Do this, and you merchants and other men of money supply the cash to buy the metal, and I'll guarantee to have that road completed in time to haul to market your wheat, pork, corn, and other produce on any day of the coming winter, regardless of the weather. Caleb tells me that you merchants have often lost good chances of the market because the roads between here and the station were so soft or so rough that a loaded wagon couldn't get over them. There are tens of thousands of cords of firewood still standing here, on land that ought to be under cultivation, but the farmers have no incentive to cut it, for there is no market but this little town. The railroad would get it to market, and at good cash prices, and thus doubly benefit the farmers. I'm told that the water-power of the creek has been holding up the Claybanks heart for years; and I know that there are enough varieties of commercial timber here to occupy several mills a long time, but no one is going to haul machinery in, and his output away, over three miles of mud or frozen clods." "True as Gospel--every word of it," said Caleb. "I've heard Jethro, an' Doc Taggess, an' ev'ry other level-headed man in town say the same thing for years." "I fully agree with them," said Philip, "but let's go back to figures a moment. I've heard nothing yet about the cost of locomotives, and other rolling stock--mere trifles, of course,--yet necessary."